The football chant is an integral part of the matchday experience. Singing bring fans together, creates unity, a feeling of belonging and is an essential part of a club's identity. Chants can make us laugh, they can make hairs stand up on the back of our necks, and they are both a barometer of and catalyst for changes in momentum on the pitch. They're synonymous with being a football supporter. Why then are we struggling with a tired repertoire of songs at Dean Court, and have still never managed to find that signature anthem that we've always craved? Why are we finding our atmosphere in decline - in spite of there being so many fans expressing a desire to make our home a louder, more intimidating, more vibrant place to watch football? It's not just us. While there are issues that are unique to our culture at Dean Court, the cutting wit and creativity of the football song seems to be a dying art. Where English crowds were once a world famous cauldron of passion and noise, we can now only look on with envy at fans in other countries and the sights and sounds that they create in support of their team. When did we become so dull? There's a boring staple set of songs that everyone sings at everyone else.. you know them all - Is This A Library.. Your Support Is Fucking Shit.. Shall We Sing A Song For You.. We Forgot That You Were Here... and many more that get aired over and over at ground after ground, week after week. There's a core set of tunes, like Bread Of Heaven, Guantanamera, La Donna E Mobile and Sloop John B giving life to chant after chant because they've got a really versatile meter and it's just easier to fit new words to a well proven melody than it is to get people to pick up something new... but my word it's become tedious. One reason for this phenomenon is the massive turnover of players we see in modern football, revolving doors at clubs with numerous players coming and going each window and a decreasing bond between fans and players. Songs are born out of that bond, when fans identify with their players. When half a dozen players come in at once, it's almost inevitable that only those emerging as fan favourites or with names that land themselves to compositions are blessed with a terrace song and many will never attract one. Another is the gentrification of football crowds, with a greater proportion of people coming to games without the intention of being an active participant. An atmosphere is something they want from the experience, but it's something they want other people to create - for them to observe, photograph and post on social media. There's a growing proportion of people in football grounds for whom the act of generating that atmosphere, participating, singing, is alien and almost beneath them. Rising ticket prices mean that there are fewer traditional working class fans able to attend games and these are the people that are more likely to sing and create atmosphere. Some of it is down to changes in music culture - there's no mainstream any more - rather dozens and dozens of genres and sub-genres. I couldn't tell you the number one in the charts today, or name a number one from the last 12 months or more. I doubt I could tell you a single song in the top 40. We all get our music from different places and algorithmic suggestions mean we get to discover and enjoy more of what we like, but there's little shared frame of reference for contemporary songs. The canon of songs to base new chants on isn't really growing as new tunes that tens of thousands of people of different ages and tastes will all know just aren't being created and making their way into the wider public consciousness. Originality does exist, but we are all so starved of anything new and so envious of those that find it, when another team hits on something we can't help but copy them. A good original song springs up every now and then - and you can be sure that every fan base in the land will have their own version for their own player before long. The song will be overused, tired and boring in no time. West Ham's Dmitri Payet chant spawned an Achey Breaky Heart at grounds up and down the country, whether it was a good fit or not - and we were all sick of hearing and singing it as quickly as we were of the Billy Ray Cyrus original. Arsenal's Tequila chant for William Saliba - a great fit, a catchy song, made a dirge by imitations.. and everyone's had a player on fire that the opposition defence is terrified of. At Bournemouth, we have cultural issues. You only have to take a cursory look at social media to see a fan base bristling with self-loathing. Our online spaces can be toxic. In recent months we've seen division and resentment between ticket buying fans and season ticket holders. We see resentment between fans that have been around for decades and those that have come to the club more recently. We see disagreements between fans wanting to stand and fans wanting to sit, between young and old - and for all sorts of footballing reasons. A day barely goes by when we do not see voices deeply critical of our fellow fans for one reason or another and people see disagreement as a personal insult - unable to just accept that people think differently, understand and move on. If football songs are an indicator of unity and feeling of belonging to something greater than oneself then much of the decline of our home atmosphere is easy to explain. We're not feeling united as a fan base. Things have improved since the appointment of Andoni Iraola as manager - the previous two managers causing division amongst fans for different reasons - but he's still just about in his honeymoon period. If results do not hit the upward trajectory we all expect, we may find a supporter base quickly becoming less united behind its manager than we have right now. If we're a fractured fan base, we're never going to generate an atmosphere as one. If we want Dean Court to become a loud, vibrant home ground as many of us do - with home support that is as good as our away following we need this to change. We need our culture in our stands and online to change, to be less antagonistic and more accepting of each other's differences and different points of view. Less divided. We need that to be an expectation, something non-negotiable - that our identity as fans of our club comes before other differences. When the toxic online culture subsides we may see more people arriving at the ground with a participant mentality and some of the cliquiness which blocks songs and chants from being picked up and spread may start to disappear. There are problems with the ground that will take a new stadium to fix and that we'll just have to live with for now. The North Stand should be our most vocal area and there should be an expectation that if you are in that stand then you are going to participate and contribute to the atmosphere.. but the ground is too small for there to be the flexibility needed to allow more choice and enable that cultural expectation to exist. People just get tickets where they can. The new stadium needs to have a dedicated single tier safe standing area for our core vocal support - and the stadium needs to be big enough, with enough pricing options for people to sit or stand in places that give them the perspective and experience they want at prices they can afford. If that is achieved, people can choose the right area for them based on more than just price and more than just availability. Once we can have more like-minded people together and our atmosphere will infinitely improve. We can do other things to encourage a particpant mentality in the meantime. The club has tried the much hated clappers, they've tried rally towels and keep tweaking things on match days to try and find the magic combination of music and presentation that lights a fire under our fans. Their thoughts are in the right place and they have to be applauded for not playing safe, trying different things and being willing to fail. The new ownership do recognise the importance of atmosphere to the overall image and appeal of the club, whether that is to new players, sponsors or selling hospitality - but there are limits on what the club can encourage from the top down. Being told by the club what to sing, what to wave, what to do feels forced. These things need to come from us, the fans. It needs to be more organic and we need our own movement to create more atmosphere, to change our culture, to signal that we have a participant mentality. There's enough people saying they want this, so it's time for that to coalesce into real actions. That can include displays, flags, scarves, set piece moments in the build up. We'd like to see our giant flag return, to see fans holding scarves and singing as one. We know many others do too so we're going to be doing everything we can to help encourage and be a part of that effort, to bring those fans together and we'll see where we can take it.